Living at Whitman has been a struggle for me so far because I don’t recycle, and that seems to be the only thing people get a hard-on for around here. At times, the ethical silence generated by the galaxy of bio-tourist eco-do-gooders that surround me is deafening. There’s this bullshit idea floating around that if we aren’t “part of the solution” than we’re “part of the problem,” but I hope that no one who says that really believes it. The promotion of “sustainability” and the idea of studying the environment as a science just reproduces the attitudes and technologies that have been responsible for the destruction of non-human others and the colonial development attitude to begin with.
Conservation is the idea that we can encircle nature and “know” nature, and then reassemble its resources to most efficiently meet our needs (one of which, in this case, is the preservation of “nature”s most “pristine” form). The creation of an attitude of “environmentalism” in the United States (and now elsewhere) is just another way for individuals’ behaviors to be regulated and controlled with no definitive ends. Modern technological thought and global surveillance systems cast the whole globe under a single regime of production and consumption. Sustainability doesn’t challenge the systems that are “destroying” the environment; it is another attempt to “perfect” its consumption.
This way of viewing life turns the whole world into a massive spreadsheet. The goal of environmentalism in this context is to police the global carrying capacity and to enable the regulation of peoples’ lives in ways that were previously unimagined. When people think that their consumption is “sustainable” or “green” then they feel entitled to consume more.
The idea of “sustainability” itself legitimizes our lifestyles as somehow worthy of sustaining. The politico-economic system of the United States shouldn’t be sustained. It is an apparatus that exports violence and attempts to obliterate alterity in its project of making all values and objects commensurable within a Cartesian field. This codifies Western forms of knowledge and scientific relationships to the world as the only “ecologically responsible” way to live.
If this is the case, then our goal must be to export our technological systems and development
ideology to ensure that the rest of the world can “develop sustainably” so they can one day reach the implicit goal of being “just like us,” save for some minor cultural tweaks. Predictably, in this worldview the United States must serve as the “leader” of the world in promoting sustainability and it’s a “travesty” that other nations could be doing more. It is the (to borrow from Timothy Luke) green man’s burden to put the entirety of “nature” into a series of massive ecomutual funds.
This techno-econo-cultural apparatus creates a focus on “threats” to the environment that are infinitely more powerful and close to home than terrorism or communism ever were (“OMFG global warming will kill everyone!!!”).
Our response, concurrently, must be far more sweeping. Every area and aspect of life must be examined and made “ecologically efficient and sustainable.” It is, furthermore, a heteronormative space implying that procreation and the prolonging of life are our ultimate goal, delegitimizing queer temporalities and modes of being. Science in general takes itself seriously to the point of allowing things like racism and heteronormativity to become invisible. Environmental sciences in particular elevate a privileged, white-supremacist, euro-centric perspective to the place of “rational” knowledge about the world. Phooey.
